Score for Los Federales: Got Shorty

The head of the biggest, baddest, Mexican drug cartel, Joaquin  "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman has been captured. Not in a bloody battle – so the movie will have to take license – but quietly from a hotel in Mazatlan.

The head of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel – who was widely considered the world's most powerful drug lord – was captured overnight by U.S. and Mexican authorities at a hotel in Mazatlan, Mexico, ending a bloody and decades-long career that terrorized large swaths of the country.

  alJazeera

Maybe ended HIS bloody career, but it won’t have ended bloody terrorization of the country by drug cartels. Something needs to be done about US drug policies for that to happen.

Guzman's capture ended a long and storied manhunt. He was rumored to live everywhere from Argentina to Guatemala since he slipped out in 2001 from prison in a laundry truck – a spectacular feat that fed his larger-than-life persona.

That’ll be good in the movie.  (They'll want to throw in this part about a gunfight a couple weeks ago in Guatemala in which it was rumored that El Chapo had been killed.)

Guzman's success and infamy surpassed those of Colombia's Pablo Escobar, who was gunned down by police in 1993 after waging a decade-long reign of terror in the South American country, killing hundreds of police, judges, journalists and politicians.

Now THAT will be a movie with no need for license.  Oh, wait.  There are already a number of those.

His arrest comes on the heels of the takedown of several top Sinaloa operatives in the past few months, and at least 10 mid-level cartel members in the past week.

The son of Sinaloa's co-leader and Guzman's partner, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, was arrested in November after entering Arizona, where he had an appointment with U.S. immigration authorities to arrange legal status for his wife.

What? No wonder the cartel came on bad times. How smart was that?

The following month, Zambada's main lieutenant was killed as Mexican helicopter gunships sprayed bullets at his mansion in the Gulf of California resort of Puerto Penasco in a four-hour gunbattle.

That’ll be good in the movie.

Days later, police in the Netherlands arrested Zambada's flamboyant top enforcer as he arrived in Amsterdam.

[...]

At one point, [Guzman’s] fortune grew to more than $1 billion, according to Forbes magazine, which listed him among the "World's Most Powerful People" and ranked him above the presidents of France and Venezuela.

In 2013, the financial magazine took Guzman off the list, saying it was likely security expenses had cut into his trove.

I thought Forbes was a respected publication. I don’t know how you determine a power ranking when you include people from every facet of the spectrum, but let’s say we can assume Forbes has this rated correctly. How do you get away with presuming something has eaten into someone’s treasury enough to knock him down your list? Perhaps I should actually read the Forbes article. Maybe alJazeera’s writer is not doing it justice. After all – are we talking about money or power? They do go hand in hand;  however, I don’t think they’re entirely interchangeable. But I digress.

I don’t keep up with cartel goings on, so I cannot tell you which cartel will now take over El Chapo’s business. But one of them will.  Unless he's got a tough and read underboss somewhere down the chain of command.  That will be good in the movie.